Audience pain points

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points refer to the problems experienced by customers across the touchpoints on their customer journey.

Customer pain points that can directly impact the business are also referred to as business pain points. To kick start the process of identifying your customer pain points that may directly affect your business, we have categorized pain points based on the business domain they align to.

What are the types of customer pain points?

• Financial Pain Points:

Financial pain points are the most critical of all pain points. Financial pain points occur when customers feel that they are paying too much for a product/ service. Your customers love choices and they are always on the lookout for cost-effective solutions that offer them more services for the money invested. Businesses need to strategize for budget-friendly options and customer-friendly subscription plans, in a way that caters to customer expectations and is aligned to business priorities.  Customer support teams and account managers should understand customer expectations, competitor benchmarks, and budget to offer an optimally priced solution that caters to the needs of the customer.

• Process Pain Points:

Process pain points may refer to road bumps along the customer journey. Not only does it affect your customers but it also impacts your support team. Businesses need to identify these bottlenecks to make the customer experience seamless across touchpoints and boost operational efficiency for their customer support agents. For instance, is it difficult for customers to contact support, or receive timely updates? Do they find themselves repeating the same information to different people or across different channels? All of these process pain points will end up frustrating your customers and pushing them to a competitor. Remember, outdated support software or poor internal collaboration may affect customer service quality in the long run. It may result in longer wait times for customers which can result in frustrated customers and helpless support agents. A single bad customer experience may lead customers to leave and eventually add to the cost of acquiring new customers, resulting in financial pain points. 

• Support Pain Points:

Support pain points are often internal issues that may restrict the businesses from resolving customer pain points quickly or effectively. Customer Support plays a pivotal role in making the customer journey seamless. For any issues that your customers face, customer support agents need to ensure customer expectations are met and each interaction with the team or a chatbot results in customer delight. The easy way to help your support teams monitor their performance and identify support pain points is to leverage an omnichannel help desk software. The integrated unified dashboard can help highlight areas of improvement for the support team and stay connected with customers to assist them along their journey.

• Productivity Pain Points:

Has your support agent struggled with rerouting queries to the right team? Did they ever have trouble figuring out customer problems? Did your team miss the SLA in providing a solution? If yes, then you might be encountering productivity pain points. Your customers expect a resolution from your support team as soon as they raise a query. They expect the experience to be seamless for the services they’re paying for. However, productivity pain points may decrease agent productivity and diminish the efforts behind the customer service offered. As a result of these internal inefficiencies, customers may end their relationship with your brand right away or may have a higher tendency to switch to a competitor brand.

While process and productivity pain points seem similar, an easy way to understand the difference is to evaluate whether the problems affecting performance are because your team has too much on their plate, or if they are finding it hard to take the next step due to inefficiencies in collaboration or communication. The former is a clear productivity issue that can be mitigated by self-service, canned responses, or AI, while the latter is process-related and requires strategic and systemic change. 

How Do You Find Your Audience’s Pain Points?

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to find problems that you can solve for your audience, once you know where to look.

1. Think of Universal Pain Points and How They Can Fit Into Your Niche

There are a few pain points that affect pretty much anyone. Things like:

• Saving and Making Money
• Improving Health
• Becoming Happier
• Gaining Freedom

If you can find a way to help people in these areas from within your niche, you’ve struck gold. These kinds of posts are especially useful because they’re known as ‘evergreen’ – (they’re always relevant because people will always be looking for solutions to these problems) Think of problems that everyone is facing, and try to find ways that you can solve them, while still relating to your niche. This is an excellent place to start if you’re new to blogging because you’ll target a broader audience. From there, you can start to source fresh, niche-specific pain points as your following grows.

2. Look in Comment Sections

Comment sections are a great place to look for pain points – especially if you’re a new blogger.  You can check out the comment sections in spaces that are relevant to your niche, such as:

• Social media accounts
• Blogs
• Youtube Videos
• Articles

Many content creators and bloggers will ask their audience to let them know in the comments if they have any questions – and that can give you a great insight into what kind of things people in your niche are looking for, and want to know.

(Comment sections are also a great place to find out what is working well for other bloggers in your niche and what kind of content your target audience enjoys seeing, which you can use as inspiration for your own posts)

3. Look at Forums and Groups

Forums and Groups are an excellent resource for finding out what your target audience wants. Join Facebook groups and online forums that are specific to your niche. Find out what people are talking about, what they are saying, what they want to know. Then start building some ideas about what is missing in your niche and what is popular. The great thing about forums or Facebook groups is that you can just ASK people what they want.

 4. Just Ask

Just asking your target audience is the easiest way to find out what they want. If you already have an audience on your blog, this is super easy, because you can just ask your audience what they want in blog posts or on social media. You can just use the comments to inspire post ideas. If you’re new to blogging, there are still other ways to ask. You can go on forums, discussion websites, groups, or on social media comment sections, and ask people in your target audience what kind of problems they wish they had solutions to.

5. Use Quora and Reddit

Quora and Reddit are sites that people use to ask and answer questions. These are fantastic resources for seeing what kind of discussions are being had in your niche, or for asking questions and connecting with potential readers. You can reach a vast audience through these sites. It’s as easy as just asking, ‘what do you wish you knew about….?’

(These can also tell you what is popular in your niche and what consistently generates attention.)

6. Reviews

One of the best ways to see what your target audience feels is missing or struggles with is reading reviews. These can be reviews about books, products, courses, or services. Good reviews will show you what you should aspire to, but BAD reviews will show you what your audience feels they are not getting. For example, if you see a majority of the bad reviews for a phone company say something along the lines of ‘we could never get hold of the complaints department’, – you could write an article called  ’10 Phone Companies Known for Their Amazing Customer Service’.

7. Keyword Research and Trends

Finding trends and using keywords is a great way to stay relevant and bring in traffic. Sites like BuzzSumo or Google Trends can give you an insight into what keywords are popular, what content is trending, and what the most popular posts from other content creators have been. It can even be as easy as just going to the bottom of the page during a google search and checking out the ‘related searches’ that google gives you. If you can see that something is consistently trending or that one type of post always ranks highly for others in your niche, then you know it’s something your audience is continuously looking for. Once you have identified popular keywords, you can brainstorm post ideas that solve issues your audience is facing that are related to those terms.

8. Social Media

Social Media is one of the most powerful tools to find out what your audience’s pain points and interests are. You can look at what is trending on twitter, or which hashtags are generating interest in your niche. You can also read the comments on your socials or the socials of other people in your niche to see what kind of things people are talking about. People are usually really vocal on social media about what they wish they had and want to see more of (especially in the comments sections!), so if you can work out how to give that to people, you’ll build yourself an audience. It’s also another platform that you can use to reach out to your target audience to ask about the kind of things they are struggling with or interested in learning about.

9. Start Conversations in Everyday Life

If you’re looking to find out what kind of problems people want to solve, why not just ask the people that you know? Find out what they would like to know about your niche, what kind of problems they would like answers to, and what they are struggling with. Even if you don’t know anyone with knowledge of/interest in your niche, you can still hit on some universal pain points. You can also ask people who fit into the demographic of your target audience what they’re biggest struggles are and gain some insight that way into what is important to that group.

10. Use Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the most valuable tools for a blogger, especially a new blogger.

Not only will Pinterest send you emails notifying you about current trends and popular searches, but you can also use it to generate keywords and trending terms. If you type a word into the search bar, underneath, you’ll see all the other related terms that people frequently look for. Every time you click onto one of these keywords, you’ll get more keywords that are in demand, so there’s no limit to how many trends you can identify.

11. Keep Track of All Your Own Pain Points

This is the easiest and possibly most overlooked way to discover a pain point. If you think about how many people there are in the world, it’s safe to say that someone else is wondering the same things you are. When I write about blogging, a lot of my content ideas come from things I wanted to know when I started and the problems that I needed to solve. Make a list of all the problems you’ve encountered in your niche, and keep that list updated whenever something new comes up. If you’ve struggled with it, someone else has (or is) too!

How to address pain points and improve customer experience?

Once you identify your customer pain points and categorize them further, you need to resolve these issues at the earliest to keep delivering an excellent customer experience.

Deploy a Feedback Management System:

Customer feedback is integral to your success. Establish a feedback management system that helps you monitor and analyze customer concerns. This empowers you to stay connected with your existing customers and constantly upgrade your product/services to meet the needs of prospective customers.

Optimize customer journeys:

Once you understand if the current solutions being offered address issues raised by your customers, you can start the process of overcoming road bumps and offering personalized customer journeys. Another way to check if the journey mapped works for your customers or not is to walk through the process yourself to experience every unexpected halt. You may even want to bring in expertise from across teams to address issues from all angles.

Document common customer pain points:

It’s important for every business to document the common customer pain points. You can leverage your knowledge base, self-service portals, or FAQ pages to address concerns raised frequently by your customers. This improves customer satisfaction and helps your teams to prioritize major pain points that need their attention. A knowledge base software helps you document tutorials, DIY guides, and answers to frequently asked questions in one place.

Automate internal processes:

Internal processes need to be optimized to reduce costs and to improve overall productivity. You may leverage your help desk software to ensure specific problems are routed to the relevant teams, to reduce waiting time for customers. You can even use the in-built automation capabilities to auto-trigger workflows for time-based escalations, to deliver as per your SLA.

Revisit your marketing strategy:

Go omnichannel. 9 out of 10 consumers prefer seamless integrations between communication channels. Having customer service software that offers a unified dashboard with a 360-degree view of customer data helps your teams to collaborate better and deliver personalized experiences across various touchpoints.